Biographer Explores the Joys and Pains of Victoria of Germany

By IVANA EDWARDS

Published: August 17, 1997

SEND your sons to war and they could be killed. Send a daughter, however bright, attractive and well intentioned, to tame a militant Teutonic tribe in a foreign land and she might be killed too, but more likely she will have a life fraught with difficulties. She could even become, posthumously, a heroine. The British, in their 19th-century arrogance, learned that with one of their own.

She was Queen Victoria's first child: Princess Royal of Britain, then Crown Princess of Prussia and later, briefly, Empress Frederick of Germany, known to her familiars as Vicky. According to a biography by Hannah Pakula, Kaiser Wilhelm II, actually went to war against his own mother and grandmother.

Along with Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, these are the principal players in Ms. Pakula's life of Vicky. ''You really could say that for want of a better relationship with her son, we might well not have had World War I and thus never World War II, since the one led directly into the other,'' Ms. Pakula said in an interview. ''There's no question that Wilhelm's love-hate relationship with England caused his behavior.''

The story of how this intelligent daughter of the British Empire and her dashing husband, Frederick (Fritz), the heir to the German throne, came not to rule her adopted country is titled, ''An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick, Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm'' (Simon & Schuster). It will be available in paperback next month. A forgotten chapter of history, Vicky's true story is not well known because her son made every attempt to suppress it. Nearly 100 years after her death, her life and mission are evidently so sensitive that every German publisher that had wanted to publish Ms. Pakula's book pulled out of the project.

It was during Vicky's time that modern Germany was created. So the book is essential reading for those who would try to understand the evils of the Third Reich. The earliest prominent German anti-Semite may have been Martin Luther, but it was in 19th-century imperial Germany that Hitler's attitudes and beliefs originated: extermination of the Jews, and German presumption of supremacy over Europe. ''Bismarck created the climate that nourished that kind of paranoia,'' Ms. Pakula said.

The biographer was speaking in the elegant library (converted from a larger formal dining room disliked by her husband) of her Manhattan apartment. She and the film director Alan J. Pakula have been married for more than 20 years. They also own a house in East Hampton.

Hannah Pakula expresses herself with verve and intensity about Germany and what happened to the woman who might have changed the course of its calamitous history.

Vicky's turbulent life was made more bearable by her marriage to the dashing Fritz, which was unusual among the often loveless dynastic alliances. This royal couple's blissful conjugality resulted in eight children and was matched by Queen Victoria's happiness with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, which produced nine children. So many of them married into royalty that Victoria was called the grandmother of Europe.

Vicky's problems began soon after she arrived, a 17-year-old bride, at the conservative court of the Prussian Hohenzollern family. It was a den of espionage, infested by Bismarck's and, later, her son's agents, all trying to thwart her liberal political philosophy and to discredit her and Fritz. A disinformation campaign, fed by distrust of Britain, lasted throughout her lifetime. Countering it was not what she had been trained for by her mentors, chiefly her adored father, Albert.

It was the dream of Prince Albert, himself German, that the German kingdoms and free cities be united under Prussia because the Hohenzollerns were the only family strong enough to accomplish it. ''Which was why these two people got married, to bring Germany into the 19th century in terms of parliaments and constitutions,'' Ms. Pakula said. ''What Albert didn't take into account was that the Hohenzollerns had gotten to where they were because they were great soldiers. And so, instead of accepting Vicky and Fritz and their ideas, they turned their backs on them.

''And the English were arrogant, but they had reason to be. They were doing better than anybody else at that point in the world. They weren't having the terrible upheavals of other countries. Also, you have to realize that these countries are a great deal older than we are and carry more baggage, and they carry more history that they're proud of. And the better we know that history, the better we know how to deal with it.''

Although she was politically astute and extraordinarily courageous, Ms. Pakula said, Vicky was also emotionally naive. Her eldest son, Wilhelm (Willy), extremely insecure, afflicted from birth by a withered arm, and entrusted to a foolish tutor, was a neurotic complex of nerves, distorted perceptions and militaristic passions whose upbringing was soon out of his mother's hands. He refused to see her when he came home from school. He also had an Oedipus complex, Ms. Pakula said. ''It comes through very strongly in his letters from school when he talks about kissing the soft insides of her hand,'' she said.